Friday, October 31, 2008

And even though Hikari's story continues in chapter 1, personally I think vol. 1 would have been a nice place to end it. Happily ever after and all that. But anyway, the author decided to go on so as a scanslator I'll go on as well. Look for vol 2 c.1 around this time next week, God willing!

The first one is more of a general overview, the second one is all about the legal aspects and stuff, really detailed. Not like you need to understand everything about salvage to enjoy this manga, but it helps.

Friday, October 24, 2008

This manga has the fastest pace I've ever seen in a shoujo manga. It's only been two chapters and they're already in the 2nd year. I would have liked it to have gone into greater detail about life in a beauty school, but at least I can't fault it for slow pacing.

Rintarou is a novice diver who just finished his training. His father dies and leaves him 1.5 billion yen [not 150 million] in debt and their rundown salvage business. Thing is, Rintarou hates his father and HATES the salvage business. What happens now?

More or less. It's really good except for one thing: Sawa-chan's 'yaranaika' jumpsuit is KILLING me!!!!

EDIT: Just realized a mistake I made. On page 38, the debt is supposed to be 1.5 billion yen (14,844,297.53 USD), not 150 million yen. To tell the truth the amount was niggling at my mind all along because it looked too small. What a million dollars or two between family, and all that, so I did the math again. I'll release a fix page when I get home from work.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

When I started this whole thing, I asked for suggestions of manga to scanslate and I've gotten a pretty positive response so far. As promised I've checked out most of the titles I got and I'm here to present my report. I will point out, though, that just because a manga is fun to read doesn't mean it's fun to scanslate. Keep that in mind.

Me and the Devil Blues: Wow, this is surprisingly good. It's been a while since I read something this good. But I don't want to do it. Yup, just like that.

No Side: As I said, I plan to do this as soon as I can get some raws. I own the books in Japanese so it doesn't matter whether they're French raws, Spanish raws, Chinese raws, whatever.

Wadatsumi (or something?): Speaking of Chinese raws, I can't read Chinese. If you want me to check something out it has to be in English or Japanese. Heck, if I could read Chinese I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be out there buying up every issue of Oriental Heroes and taking a month off work to read them all, ni hao!

Say Hello to Black Jack - There's no denying it's an excellent manga, but... I hate hospitals and medical dramas so I don't see myself working on this. You should've seen the look on my face when I was reading the operating scenes. When it got to the second chapter with the old man, urrgggghhhh...delete.

Jigoku Sensei Nube - Not bad, but not interesting enough to justify 31 volumes of work. I don't have that kind of stamina yet. And the whole occult thing is a bit....

Rainbow - The content is too raw and messy and depressing for me. I couldn't even make it through the first chapter. Just violence and sadism doesn't necessarily make for a good manga.

Wind Mill - It's from the same mangaka as Yakitate Japan so I was expecting something good but I was rather disappointed. Come to think of it, I've read a lot of manga about baseball but not a single one to date has been able to make me care about or understand the game.

I forgot to mention this last time, but Hikari is supposed to be speaking with a Fukuoka accent. They're trying to make her out to be some sort of country hick, with all the stereotypes involved. Since I don't know what a country hick is supposed to sound like (does "y'all" go on every line or every other line?") I decided to skip translating that to avoid making a mess of it. But keep it in mind.

About the other manga I said I was working on, since I'm editing it now I guess I can say what it is: Wa ga na wa Umishi. It starts out a bit slow but the cast grew on me pretty quickly. Even Sawa-chan. Chapter 1 in a couple of days, God willing.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

If you really truly want to do a project, it shouldn't matter if anyone else is doing it. If your desires are so shallow that you'd stop simply because your version isn't being read by as many people, then why do it in the first place?

Sunday, October 12, 2008

I always wanted to scanslate a shoujo series, and this is only 2 volumes long so I hope to be done soon. The title is "To Be..." and the story goes something like this:

In order to become a beautician, Hikari Takaya moves to Tokyo with her high-school sweetheart. But life at beauty school is completely different from what she expected. A love story about the dreams and romance of youth. Author: Sakurayama Kazumi.

I used to be quite the shoujo reader a few years ago, but then I quickly realized that most of them are just recycling the same stories and cliches over and over again. The few good ones are really good, but you have to sift through a lot of chaff to get to it. Of course every manga "genre" has its share of poor series, but I think it's only shoujo that has fully 90% of its titles being next to terrible. I wish I could say that "To Be..." was one of the rare exceptions, but... well, I'll let you make up your own minds:

Friday, October 10, 2008

At long last we come to the end of Trickster. Actually I'm surprised a single volume took me so long to finish, so I pledge to do better next time (not!). I really enjoyed working on this because it's easy to translate and easy to edit, and I loved the girl's evil facial expressions. I'd like to that think no one's stupid enough to fall for tricks like that IRL, but people are full of surprises.

For those who can't download from Rapidshare, I discovered that Lurk (#lurk @ irc.irchighway.net) has all the Otaku no Musume-san and Trickster I've done so far.

As for my next projects, I have two lined up. One shoujo, one shounen/seinen (i.e. a shounen that just happened to run in a seinen magazine but would do just as well in Shounen Sunday/Jump/Magazine). I'm not going to name them yet because I haven't gotten that far and I think it's annoying when people "claim" projects too early and then keep people waiting while they take their sweet time churning out the first chapter. So it'll be ready when it's ready, yah?

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

With the release of this chapter, I am officially handing over the Otaku no Musume-san project to the Endless Abyss group. In other words I'm dropping it. What happened is that after I released chapter 7 they sent me a message along the lines of "Waaaah, we wanted to do it, waaah!" (errr, not quite, but you get the picture). Touched by their atrocious sense of timing, I immediately decided to let them have it, from chapter 10 onwards. Yeah sure, I could very well have said "Tough cookies" but in the end the manga gets scanslated and I get the time to do something else, so it all works out in the end.

Incidentally this was all two weeks ago, so I'd like to think plans are far advanced to release 10+ by now. Go bug them at their forums or something. Come to think of it, Endless Abyss is a very unfortunate name for a scanslation group...

Mediafire still won't work, and quite frankly I'm sick of fooling around with that thing. This time I tried to go with Filefactory, but that wouldn't work either. Rapidshare it is:Otaku_no_Musume-san_v01_c09

Monday, October 6, 2008

One of the suggestions I got for scanslation early on was a 4-koma manga called Working!!I decided to check it out over the weekend, but I'm sorry to say it won't be going on my scanslation list. Ever. That's not to say it's a bad manga, btw. Maybe a 6/10? More like 5/10? It hovers between okay to meh, usually leaning towards the meh side. I read the scanslations first and thought they were at fault for making the manga seem so bleh (they certainly didn't help at all), but actually it's nearly as unfunny in the original Japanese. Also accurate translation is an essential part of getting the joke across in 4-koma manga, but translating gags is a MAJOR pain in the nether-regions, and it doesn't help when the gag isn't that funny to begin with. So now you know.

(Btw, don't think I'm going to post detailed explanations for deciding/not-deciding to scanslate anything. This is a one-time service.)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Here goes chapter 8. I sympathize with Kanau-chan, poor thing. But when I was in fourth-grade I didn't know a thing about ecchi stuff. "Daddy why does that lady have all her clothes off?" Kids of today aren't kids any more, tut tut.

While I'm at it, I've been re-reading Hajime no Ippo (for the 50th time), and the referee is totally cheating for Ippo! He fell down 3 times again Vorg and the referee let him keep going each time! Everyone else falls once, maybe twice and he calls the match on the spot. Cheat! Cheat!!!